Has Education Set You Free?
Education is not about how much you have mugged up, how far you can reproduce what you have mugged up, how many degrees you have, which institution you went to, or how much you are earning out of the years that you spent learning.
Our wise elders did not believe in all these. They had a simple criterion to know whether you are a learned person or not.
Has education set you free? Has education strengthened your mind?
A fool is affected every day by a thousand causes of sorrow. A fool is affected every day by a hundred reasons to be scared, to be anxious.
This won't happen with a learned person. If your education has been good, if your learning is sound, then you won't be perturbed by anything. It is not that you will be indifferent to situations around you. You will have to react and conduct yourself according to the situation.
But the situations won't push you into depression, anxiety, fear, or sadness.
The COVID pandemic is the best situation to assess yourself. Of course, it is imperative that we all have to follow the protocol and guidelines given by the authorities. It is not just about you; your carelessness can affect others also.
But is it limited to this? People have gone into paranoia, insomnia, depression, and all kinds of psychiatric conditions. It is not information but misinformation and disinformation that are affecting people.
Even information, the right information, the true information, is there for you to act upon. This is what learned people do. They verify the veracity of the information coming to them using their own intelligence and discretion and then act upon it if required. Information should not trigger anxiety or fear in you. If information is worded in such a way that it can trigger anxiety and fear in you, then be careful—there is an agenda behind it.
You have to apply a filter and accept only that part which is neutral. It should not be like the script of a horror film. If this is the kind of information that is coming to you, then it is disinformation deliberately being given to you with an agenda. The best way to go ahead in such situations is to refer to the official notifications of the authorities.
You should see how a doctor explains his condition to a cancer patient, explains the options, and enables him to take decisions. There is a scientific neutrality about it. There are no emotions involved. Why should there be emotions when you are talking about something which is obvious and measurable?
This kind of information is trustworthy.
Two headlines:
- Sensex plunges 2000 points on COVID concerns.
- Analysts predict doom for the stock market on COVID fears.
The first one is information. The second one is done purposely so that the market goes bearish, people run for their money, and do disaster selling of their investments.
This is the kind of information you should be wary about.
It can be misinformation also—there is no agenda but it is fake, spread by those who have no authority or knowledge to disseminate information.
All these are not going to stop.
In spite of strict laws and self-regulation of communication, misinformation and disinformation are not going to stop.
It is in your hands to filter out genuine information from among these.
For this, you have to approach and handle information with maturity.
That this is meant for me to act upon. I will not get scared or anxious about the content of this information.
This is where a spiritual perspective helps. Our scriptures have been telling us again and again, in different ways, that these 60, 70, 80 years—this part is just a minuscule part of your journey, which is spread over billions of years.
If someone is going to die, he is going to be reborn. What is there so much to worry about death? Diseases, pain, suffering—they are all part of life. Your body may suffer; you may not be able to do anything about it. But whether to allow your mind to suffer—that is entirely in your hands. And it is independent of the situations around you, including the state of your body.
If you are mature enough to handle information and act upon information in a mature way, then you are educated, learned. Otherwise, sorry, you are not.
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